Abstract
This paper contributes to global debates over the in/formal binary through an analysis of the South African state’s provision of formal housing to residents previously living informally or insecurely. Focusing on cases within the cities of eThekwini and Msunduzi, it uses a mix of empirical data from housing beneficiaries and government officials alongside an analysis of documents to examine the processes and experiences of housing formalisation. The paper makes two key contributions. The first is to argue for a stronger focus on the processes of dichotomisation of the in/formal binary. It illustrates the significance of a processual analysis by examining shifts in South African housing policy and residents’ expectations of housing gain, noting a situation of hyperbole, where informal housing is regarded as unacceptable, to one of waning, where policy statements acknowledge a greater role for informality. The second contribution is to direct analysis to the idea of formal housing and processes of formalisation, as these have arguably received less attention in wider debates. The paper proposes the concept of marginalised formalisation to articulate both the shortcomings experienced by residents living in formal housing and also the misrepresentation of housing policy and government rhetoric of the benefits of formalisation. Marginalised formalisation is contextualised within ongoing urban poverty which frames this reality.
Highlights
The paper proposes the concept of marginalised formalisation to articulate the shortcomings of ideas of formalisation present in housing policy and government rhetoric when considered in relation to residents’ lived experiences of living in formal contexts in conditions of severe poverty and inequality
This concept resonates with research on the receipt of state housing or mechanisms to legalise previously informal housing elsewhere in contexts of poverty, which points to the challenges, and the potential dangers and risks, of formal housing for beneficiaries (McFarlane, 2012; van Gelder, 2013)
This paper argues that in the South African case, because of the history of racially determined Apartheid dispossession, informality as a way of living and informal housing are ‘overstated’ as illegitimate in the post-apartheid era
Summary
Troubling the dichotomies between in/formal, in/formality, and in/formalisation has been the focus of much recent global critical scholarship within urban studies, planning and housing (Banks et al, 2019; Boudreau and Davis, 2017; Lombard and Huxley, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; Porter, 2011; Roy and Alsayyad, 2004; Schmid et al, 2018; Song, 2016; van Gelder, 2013; and Verloo, 2017). This paper employs the wider literature’s critical recognition of the role of in/ formality in underpinning core planning interventions, as well as critiques of the persistence of the in/formality binary, as an analytical context; it works to focus attention on the lived experiences of processes of formalisation through the concept of marginalised formalisation This framing reveals how formalisation is tied, in complicated ways, to conceptions of wider changing socio-economic relations summed up by the notion of ‘decency’, a descriptor employed by the South African state (Sisulu, 2008) to describe qualities of formal housing, and by extension those who inhabit it, and their ways of being. It reveals the ways in which the binary divisions between formal and informal are entrenched through the discourses and narratives employed, drawing powerful normative inferences, which suggest housing forms are readily distinguishable
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